Sometimes, the biggest innovations and most important discoveries come not as a result of a group of creative minds pitting their energies together in efforts to create a single product, but by pure chance. At times, even accidentally. From hit songs to scientific breakthroughs and countless inventions, many things we don't even think about today only exist because they were initially half-baked or seen by their creators as blunders.

When speaking with Cultofmac.com, Abraham Farag, the former Apple Senior Mechanical of Product Design, shone a light on how the button-free Apple mouse came to be when a few Cupertino staff members laid out a bunch of proposed designs for a new desktop mouse back in 1999.

"It all started with a model we did not have time to finish," Farag told Cultofmac. "We had made six of these great form models to show Steve. They were fully done, with all the parting lines cut in for buttons and different plastic parts, and all the colors just right."

However, at the 11th hour, the engineers who worked on these proposed designed opted to add a new addition to the mix. There was just one problem: it wasn't completely hashed out, and the team didn't have time to outline where the buttons on that prototype would be.

Farag and the crew weren't exactly proud of their creation. "It looked like a grey blob," he said. "We were going to put that model into a box so people wouldn't see it."

Then, Steve Jobs showed up to the meeting, and that's where everything changed.

"Steve looked at the lineup of potential forms and made straight for the unfinished one," Farag says.

"That's genius," Jobs said. "We don't want to have any buttons."

Someone in the room chimed in with: "That's right, Steve. No buttons at all."

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